Franklin Kane

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

This simplicity, in the face of her own deep knowledge—the knowledge she had built on in sending for Franklin Kane a week ago—roused a ruthless ire in Miss Grizel. 'I'm afraid that you've let your own wishes sadly deceive you,' she said. 'I must tell you, since you evidently don't know it, that Mr. Kane is in love with Helen; deeply in love with her. From what I understand of the situation you have sacrificed him to your own feeling, and perhaps sacrificed Miss Jakes too; but I don't go into that.'

It was now Gerald's turn to gaze and gasp; he did not gasp, however; he only gazed—gazed with a gaze no longer inward and unseeing. He was, at last, seeing everything. He fell back on the one most evident thing he saw, and had from the beginning seen. 'But Helen—she could never have loved him. Such a marriage would be unfit for Helen. I'm not excusing myself. I see I've been an unpardonable fool in one way.'

Miss Grizel's ire increased. 'Unfit for Helen? Why, pray? He would have given her the position of a princess—in our funny modern sense. I intended, and I made the marriage. I saw he'd fallen in love with her—dear little man—though at the time he didn't know it himself. And since then I've had the satisfaction—one of the greatest of my life—of seeing how happy I had made both of them. It was obvious, touchingly so, that he was desperately in love with Helen. Yes, Gerald, don't come to me for sympathy and help. You've wrecked a thing I had set my heart on. You've wrecked Mr. Kane, and my opinion is that you've wrecked Helen too.'

Gerald, who had become very pale, kept his eyes on her, and he went back to his one foothold in a rocking world. 'Helen could never have loved him.'

Miss Grizel shook her hand impatiently above her knee. 'Love! Love! What do you all mean with your love, I'd like to know? What's this sudden love of yours for Helen, you who, until yesterday, were willing to marry another woman for her money—or were you in love with her too? What's Miss Jakes's love of Mr. Kane, who, until a week ago, thought herself in love with you? And you may well ask me what is Mr. Kane's love of Helen, who, until a week ago, thought himself in love with Miss Jakes? But there I answer you that he is the only one of you who seems to me to know what love is. One can respect his feeling; it means more than himself and his own emotions. It means something solid and dependable. Helen recognised it, and Helen's feeling for him—though it certainly wasn't love in your foolish sense—was something that she valued more than anything you can have to offer her. And I repeat, though I'm sorry to pain you, that it is clear to me that you have wrecked her life as well as Mr. Kane's.'

Miss Grizel had had her say. She stood up, her lips compressed, her eyes weighty with their hard, good sense. And Gerald rose, too. He was at a disadvantage, and an unfair one, but he did not think of that. He thought, with stupefaction, of what he had done in this room the day before to Franklin and to Helen. In the depths of his heart he couldn't wish it undone, for he couldn't conceive of himself now as married to Althea, nor could he, in spite of Miss Grizel's demonstrations, conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane. But with all the depths of his heart he wished what he had done, done differently. And although he couldn't conceive of Helen as married to Franklin Kane, although he couldn't accept Miss Grizel's account of her state as final, nor believe her really wrecked—since, after all, she loved him, not Franklin—he could clearly conceive from Miss Grizel's words that by doing it as he had, he had wrecked many things and endangered many. What these things were her words only showed him confusedly, and his clearest impulse now was to see just what they were, to see just what he had done. Miss Grizel couldn't show him, for Miss Grizel didn't know the facts; Helen would not show him, she refused to see him; his mind leaped at once, as he rose and stood looking rather dazedly about before going, to Franklin Kane. Kane, as he had said yesterday, was the one person in the world before whom one could have such things out. Even though he had wrecked Kane, Kane was still the only person he could turn to. And since he had wrecked him in his ignorance he felt that now, in his enlightenment, he owed him something infinitely delicate and infinitely deep in the way of apology.

'Well, thank you,' he said, grasping Miss Grizel's hand. 'You had to say it, and it had to be said. Good-bye.'

Miss Grizel, not displeased with his fashion of taking her chastisement, returned his grasp. 'Yes,' she said, 'you couldn't go on as you were. But all the same, I'm sorry for you.'

'Oh,' Gerald smiled a little. 'I don't suppose you've much left for me, and no wonder.'

'Oh yes, I've plenty left for you,' said Miss Grizel. And, in thinking over his expression as he had left her, the smile, its self-mockery, yet its lack of bitterness, his courage, and yet the frankness of his disarray, she felt that she liked Gerald more than she had ever liked him.